Nintendo Wii: You got served!

I visited my older brother Brent earlier today and Gemma, his daughter, introduced me to Wii Sports for the first time. Also for the first time, I was destroyed playing sports against someone who’s about 1/4 my age.

For those of you who don’t know, the Wii operates by using some funky motion sensors that allow it to detect when you move your hands, thus swinging a racket or a bat or throwing the controller through the TV screen. I’m sure the game interprets that last one pretty badly, but it’s hard to tell when there’s no screen anymore.

So during the course of our gaming, I was swinging myself around, getting all hot and sweaty and nasty, and I had very few positive results to show for it. Some of my not-so-shining moments included winning points in tennis because Gemma helped me win—she’d hit the ball when it was out of bounds because she wanted to play to deuce—I managed to get one hit out of the infield playing baseball and I discovered I’m very adept at rolling gutter balls when I’m bowling. The worst, though… I need to work on my boxing skills.

Or perhaps I just need to work on my Wii technique. Brent explained that not only do the sensors detect motion, they detect the way you’re pointing the controllers. Thus, when you’re pointing your hands forward instead of holding them upright, the punch will land lower on the target, which would explain my difficulties with one of the training exercises. The Nintendo trainer has a pad on each hand and holds them up one at a time for you to punch. Each time you hit a pad, you get a point. Each time you hit the trainer, you get minus one point.

Because I was having trouble with the controllers… I think a real trainer would have been a little pissed off. During the course of a minute, I managed to hit the pads 14 times, but I also punched him in the gut 24 times. That’s when I started to wonder if I might have been better off just throwing the controller at the TV screen—at least I would have only missed the pads once.